This prostitute in Light in August has just had sex with a black patron before Joe's "turn," so she responds with indifference when Christmas tries to provoke her by saying "that he is a negro" (225). In response, he beats her so badly that "at first they thought that the woman was dead" (225).
Part of the time Christmas is on "the street which was to run for fifteen years" in Light in August he spends in Chicago and Detroit, living and eating "with negroes" (225) as a Negro himself. He fights with any of the black men "who call him white" (225).
In Light in August Joe Christmas and this woman lives "as man and wife" in Chicago or Detroit (225). According to the narrator, , she resembles "an ebony carving," and as Joe lies in bed with her he "tries to breathe into himself the dark odor, the dark and inscrutable thinking and being of negroes" (225-26). Since she is the only Negro woman whom the narrative mentions Joe living with, it seems likely that she is the woman Joe is remembering when he thinks about the possibility that Joanna might reject him: "No white woman ever did that.
According to Joanna in Light in August, many members of the Burrington family she descends from still live in New Hampshire, although she has only seen these relatives "perhaps three times in her life" (241).
In a cabin that he enters during his flight in Light in August, Christmas "sees negro dishes, negro food," and feels the presence of "flight and abrupt consternation" (335). From these details we can construct the blacks who live in the cabin, but in fact they never appear except as the "long, limber black hands" that put the food in front of him. And they are only heard in the "wails of terror and distress" that Christmas "hears without hearing them" (335). As he eats, Christmas registers their fear and calls himself "their brother" (335).
During the thirty years that the Hineses live in Mottstown in Light in August, they depend largely on the charity of the Negroes who live in their neighborhood, despite Doc's racist sermons and overall belligerence. In particular the narrative mentions "the negro women" of Mottstown, who bring dishes of food, possibly from the white kitchens where they cook, to the Hineses at their house (341).
In Light in August these Negroes live in Freedman Town, the specifically black section of Jefferson. Though they are described as "invisible" to Joe, as he walks past their cabins he is very conscious of the way they and their "negro smell" seem to enclose him, "like bodiless voices murmuring talking laughing in a language not his" (114). He is particularly conscious of the murmuring "bodiless fecundmellow voices of [the] negro women" there (115).
In Light in August these members of "remote negro churches" "about the county" listen to Doc Hines when he interrupts their services to commandeer the pulpit and preach to them about "the superiority of the white race" (343). The narrator says that they "believed that he was crazy, touched by God," or "perhaps" even "God himself," "since God to them was a white man too and His doings also a little inexplicable" (344).
